Man is the creature who does not know what to desire.
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” — Theodore Roosevelt
There is someone in your field, or your circle, whose work you do not particularly admire, whose values you do not share, and whose success you have nonetheless been tracking with a precision you would be embarrassed to admit.
You check their profile and cou count their recognition. You measure your life against theirs, and it unsettles you, which is remarkable given that you do not even want what they have.
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.” —René Girard
Girard’s great insight is that desire is rarely spontaneous. We do not want things in a vacuum. We want them because someone else wants them, or has them, or appears to want them.
The object of desire matters less than the person whose desire we are imitating, which is why we can find ourselves envying people we actively dislike, because envy is not about admiration. It is about proximity and visibility.
Social media has made this relentless. The feed is a machine for producing comparisons, and it is indifferent to whether the comparisons are meaningful. It simply surfaces visible people, and visibility is enough to activate the response.
The productive question is not ‘Am I doing as well as they are?’ but ‘Why does their version of success have any claim over me?’ If you sat quietly with your actual values, would what they have even be on the list? Often it would not. The envy is real, but the object it has attached itself to is arbitrary.
The comparison is rarely about them. It is about an unresolved feeling about where you are in relation to where you thought you would be by now.
That feeling deserves your attention.
The person you have attached it to does not.
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